During his 2020 campaign, President Joe Biden promised to “aggressively limit” the role of local law enforcement in policing immigration. And yet, despite the repeated calls from more than 60 members of Congress and 100 advocacy organizations urging the Biden administration to follow through, collaborations between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and local law enforcement remain widely in place.
This hurts families and communities, perpetuating a system where racial profiling can lead to protracted detention and deportation.
Biden’s promises remain unfulfilled, and local law enforcement agencies remain deeply enmeshed with ICE.
One of the most notorious of these policies is Section 287 (g), which since 1996 has allowed ICE to deputize local police officers as quasi-immigration officers, granting them the power to investigate individuals’ immigration status and transfer individuals into ICE detention. In cities and localities where 287(g) is being used, the program has been criticized for enabling racial profiling and other unconstitutional policing practices, as illustrated by Justice Department investigations in North Carolina and Arizona.
There’s also Secure Communities, an Obama-era program that exploits routine police fingerprinting to screen for immigration status. When Secure Communities’ automated systems indicate someone may be deportable, ICE issues a “detainer” that asks police to detain the person. Although numerous courts have found that ICE detainers lack the necessary probable cause to independently justify continued custody, local law enforcement agencies largely tend to acquiesce to these requests.
In a recent white paper published by Project South and the Community Health Law Partnership at the University of Georgia School of Law, we highlight the drastic rise in ICE detainers issued during the first half of Trump’s presidency across three Southern states: Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. This rise of jailhouse immigration enforcement in these three states mesh with anti-immigrant state legislation and policies at the state and local levels.
Our findings, based on records obtained through two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, reveal that between 2016 and 2018, ICE detainers doubled in North Carolina, almost tripled in South Carolina, and nearly quadrupled in Georgia. Notably, ICE’s proclivity to rampantly issue detainers did not turn on the existence of 287(g) contracts. Indeed, in our study, only three of the ten local law enforcement entities with the highest rate of detainer requests had active 287(g) agreements.
The law enforcement databases ICE relies on to issue detainers are notoriously unreliable and have been shown to have racially disproportionate impacts. Our study reveals that ICE’s own records indicate that it eventually realized it had erroneously issued detainers for at least 189 individuals who were not legally subject to removal proceedings, due to U.S. citizenship or other lawful immigration status. The actual number of legally erroneous detainers is likely much higher.
At the local level, several counties in our area of study have recently voted out anti-immigrant sheriffs, leading to the termination of long-standing 287(g) agreements. In Georgia, as a result of organizing and advocacy efforts by grassroots organizations such as the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, the newly elected sheriffs in Gwinnett and Cobb County ended their 287(g) agreements in January 2021. During the same month, the sheriff in Charleston County, S.C., also terminated the county’s 287(g) agreement, citing concerns about racial profiling.
While this handful of county level terminations are steps in the right direction, the Biden administration can curtail these programs nationwide. Yet nearly a year into his presidency, Biden’s promises remain unfulfilled, and local law enforcement agencies remain deeply enmeshed with ICE.
To effectively protect immigrant communities and work towards a more humane immigration system, Biden must uphold his campaign promise and end these programs.
This column was produced for The Progressive magazine and distributed by Tribune News Service.